How to use Jekyll from iOS

Most of the editing I do on this blog is/will be done on my laptop, and mostly in Vim. But what if I want to post something while I am away from my laptop?

I need to figure something out.

This post was written entirely on my iPad and iPhone, with a bunch of different apps, in my attempt to figure out how best to write posts when away from my laptop.

Prose.io - Free

Prose.io seems good. This was one of the first things I found when I Googled for Jekyll editors, so I think it is designed specifically for Jekyll sites. I have been writing this post in that site so far, and it works okay, but not particilarly well.

The most annoying part is that it does not take advantage of iOS’s autocorrect1, e.g. spelling, uppercasing first letters, double-tap space for full stop.

Source for iOS - Free?

The app is actually free, but being able to push back to GitHub is an in-app purchase. Sort of.

This one took a while to get started. It wasn’t able to set up my SSH key to GitHub, so I had to add that manually. Once that was in place, it all went swimmingly.

This one is a full fledged git client, so it lets me edit any file in the repo. And it also has offline editing, which is nice.

No preview functionality, but that’s fine; that’s not what the app is for.

It does have a few keyboard issues though. It has its own keyboard, which can be used in other apps. It looks like it is supposed to have quick access to special characters, but I can’t see how that is supposed to work. You can disable the custom keyboard, but even then there is none of iOS’s autocorrection, which makes it frustrating to use.

I would like to love this app, but I would need more keyboard behaviour settings before I am happy with it.

I have listed it as free with a question mark because it says that pushing to a remote repo is part of the £4.99 in app purchase, but it looks like that works fine in the free version. I suspect the answer is that pushing to other remote repos is the premium feature. Or it could be a bug, because when I try to push without committing at the same time, it prompts me to pay for then in app purchase.